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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9506010" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And? Sales are at best a loose proxy of quality. Lots of things that are poor quality sell very well. Lots of things that are excellent quality barely sell at all. Pretending that sales are an effective substitute for quality is an example of "surrogation": allowing a metric to replace the thing that it's actually attempting to measure. Various "laws" of economic policy, such as Campbell's law and Goodhart's law, as well as the "McNamara fallacy," are examples of this in action. A really good practical example happened with World of Warcraft a few years back. Starting around ten-ish years ago or maybe a bit more, instead of trying to find out what things actually made players happy and eager to play the game, they looked solely at what things players chose to spend time on, measured by number of interactions per month or how many players interacted with particular content or the like. This sounds, in principle, like a decent idea: if players interact with something, they must value it in some way. The problem comes in when you conflate this measured interaction with the customer truly being happy about something. And in this case, that led to some very, very unhappy customers a couple expansions down the line. See, sometimes the players were holding their noses and doing something they didn't really like, but which would give them lots of power they could then apply to things they did like. Or sometimes, the players were happy with a thing being one part of this balanced breakfast, but quickly soured on it when it was inflated out of proportion with the rest of the game. Or one small slice of the community was rabidly engaged with a thing, and the rest were pretty tepid about it. Or the thing in question was really good at exploiting the sunk-cost fallacy, so even if a player wasn't having as much fun as they used to, they'd feel they had to stick with it to get to the end. Etc., etc.This led to a number of unwise management and development decisions....which nonetheless still resulted in wildly impressive sales numbers. The expansion that finally broke the camel's back, Shadowlands, was by far the fastest-selling expansion ever sold, having moved something like four and a half million units in just a few days, and did in fact sell better than the previous expansion had. And yet the customer base was pissed only a few short months later, after they'd already sunk the money in etc. This led to a mass exodus to other games, notably the then-riding-high Final Fantasy XIV, and a major reckoning at Blizzard HQ. They have since radically retooled their approach, completely reversed course on a number of things, and worked very, very hard to focus on actual customer satisfaction, rather than the proxies they had been using and which had become foolish surrogates for actual customer satisfaction.Now, I'm not saying 5e is anywhere remotely this bad. It took years of serious, severe mismanagement for WoW to get into that state--and video games necessarily work on a much faster audience response timetable than tabletop games ever will, so the D&D equivalent would be multiple decades and WotC has only barely entered their third decade at this point. Instead, my point is to show, with a specific and real-world concrete example, that proxy measurements, even concrete ones like sales, are not guaranteed to give you the whole picture.Or, as I've said many times on this forum, a product can be really not very well-made at all, but still insanely popular, and another product can be unbelievably well-made and yet barely sell. Windows vs Linux, for example; in many ways, Linux has been the superior operating system for many years, even for business or education purposes, and yet Windows is absolutely dominant over those spaces.We need more data than just sales. Especially for something that has significant social forces separate from the product's design...like being the "oldest" of a particular product, or the "most widely played" etc. Network effects matter a LOT.No. Trying to cater to all of them without rigorous playtesting and refinement would be a mess.Game design is difficult. That it is difficult is not a reason to say it is impossible.I mean, it didn't help that the Champion objectively sucked relative to all but one other Fighter subclass (the Banneret/Purple Dragon Knight, which was absolute trash). The Champion was, provably, built needing a certain minimum number of combat rounds per short rest just to keep up with other Fighters, let alone something like a Paladin. Most groups simply did not fight that many rounds of combats between short rests, and did not have enough short rests per long rest. The Champion was, objectively, designed for a gameplay style that most people simply did not want to play, and which WotC should have been able to see that people didn't want to play, because this was discovered almost immediately upon release by actual players.</blockquote>

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